Manfred Mohr — P-series (Divisibility)

1975

Artists: Manfred Mohr · Year: 1975 · Medium: Plotter drawings and later paintings; six-dimensional and eight-dimensional hypercube projections · Substrate: Mohr's own continuously evolving FORTRAN / C / later-language code; various plotters and screen-output devices over the period · Place: Paris / New York, USA · Institution: Independent practice The P-series, which Manfred Mohr began in 1975 as a successor to Cubic Limit, moves his hypercube investigation from four dimensions into six, and then into eight. The mathematical complexity increases substantially — a six-dimensional hypercube has sixty-four vertices and 192 edges, an eight-dimensional hypercube has 256 vertices and 1,024 edges — and the visual character of the projections changes accordingly. Where Cubic Limit drawings read as comprehensible wireframe shapes, P-series drawings become denser, more textile-like, more difficult to decode as projections of a specific object. They retain their logic but read first as pattern. What the P-series demonstrates is that Mohr's investigation does not exhaust with the hypercube's four-dimensional case. The higher-dimensional hypercubes are not merely more complex versions of the four-dimensional object; they are qualitatively different things visually, with their own compositional possibilities. Mohr spent fifteen years on the P-series, producing several hundred works, and the progression from early to late pieces shows a clear deepening of his handling of six- and eight-dimensional projection. The P-series is probably Mohr's most commercially successful body of work; the drawings were collected seriously through the 1980s and 1990s, and their visual richness made them easier for collectors to live with than the sparser Cubic Limit works. They are in the collections of Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Victoria and Albert Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, and the Ludwig Museum. Lore Mohr moved from Paris to New York in the early 1980s, mid-P-series, and switched from mainframe computing to personal computers over the course of the series. The transition is visible in the later P-series works, which exploit the faster feedback loop of interactive computing. Mohr has written that the P-series was the work that finally convinced him he had found his lifetime subject. He has continued working on higher-dimensional projections into the 2020s, in his eighties, at studio in New York. Sources • Mohr, Manfred — P-Series exhibition catalogs (various, 1976–1990) • bitforms gallery — Mohr catalog and monographs • Centre Pompidou — Mohr collection